The chief of exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art told a philanthropist that absorbing the failing Corcoran would make “his collection at the National Gallery … greater than the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
National Gallery of Art
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Corcoran Merger with George Washington University and National Gallery Finalized
The Corcoran Gallery of Art’s absorption into George Washington University (GWU) and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, first announced in February, has been finalized, the Washington Post reported.
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National Exhibition Will Fill US Billboards with Art
Five American art museums and the Outdoor Advertising Association of America will mount a nationwide public art exhibition this summer. Art Everywhere will bring reproductions of some 50 artworks from the museums’ collections — chosen how else but through an online public vote — to billboards, subway platforms, train stations, and more.
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Two Photographers Emerge from the Shadows with Over 400 Artist Portraits
Few people may know the names of Shunk-Kender, but the pair of photographers behind that hyphenated moniker have captured many of the most famous images of post-war modern and contemporary art in Paris and New York and together they documented many ephemeral events that would’ve been lost to history if it were not for their work.
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Shock of the Old: The Pre-Raphaelites Go Back to the Future
In its first iteration in London, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, the survey now on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, bore the edgier title Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde. We may not customarily think of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) — founded in secret in September 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and soon attracting other artists — as an avant-garde, but the label does seem apt. The PRB painters and their affiliated artists were an embattled band of refuseniks, rejecting the standard practices of modern painting, and with it modernity itself, as corrupt and unsustainable.
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Single Point Perspective: Dürer’s Doomed Knight
Last week I wrote about several drawings and watercolors from the spectacular exhibition of works on paper by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) at the National Gallery of Art, leaving aside the show’s phenomenal selection of prints. I would like to return, however, to one engraving in particular.
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Dürer in DC: Some Observations on the Great Observer
WASHINGTON, DC — If you need one good reason to see the must-see Albrecht Dürer: Master Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints From the Albertina at the National Gallery of Art, that reason would be the shockingly holographic “Head of an Apostle Looking Up” from 1508.
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Postage Due: Joan Miró’s Alternative History
For a call for help, it packs a punch: an outsized yellow fist, raised in salute, all but leaps out of the blue background of Joan Miró’s color stencil “Aidez l’Espagne” (“Help Spain,” 1937). Open-mouthed, the stylized Catalan peasant who dominates the image is an emblem of strength and energy — a rooster crowing, a poet singing. In his paintings of the 1920s and 1930s, Miró achieved an unsettling power by delving into the unconscious, creating yawning expanses suggestive of colorful abysses and symbol-laden dreamscapes strewn with biomorphic forms. But in “Aidez l’Espagne,” he opted for the direct simplicity of graphic propaganda.
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Crazy Lady Attacks Topless Gauguin [UPDATE]
Sometimes art criticism gets physical. According to reports from the Washington Post, a woman attempted to grab Gauguin’s “Two Tahitian Women” (1899) painting off the wall of DC’s National Gallery, screaming “this is evil” and pounding at the painting’s plastic covering with her fists. Talk about seeing red.
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Allen Ginsberg’s Beat Photographs on Display
I had no idea renowned beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) was an avid amateur photographer. A current exhibition of his black and white snapshots are on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and they are annotated by Ginsberg himself, who rediscovered his early photos (made between 1953 and 1963) in the 1980s.
